Magic: The Gathering C/D

Inspired by this thread/the equiv thread in the sandbox, I found some local bars here that have weekly drafts and went along to a couple of them after getting some practice in (also, reading about a decade's worth of Mark Rosewater columns on design, heh) - was pretty easy to slip back into (sets seem pretty draft-friendly), but quite a different game to when I stopped playing (Tempest-y?).
One of the nights they ran a "Chaos draft" using a couple of boosters from nearly every set back to The Dark & Homelands - they make Legends/Arabian Nights look pretty powerful, heh. Lot of people seem to play EDH/Commander, but I don't think I could easily rustle up a deck.

chaos draft sounds rad, wouldn't that be super expensive tho

revised and later packs are actually p cheap because there are so many unplayable rares

http://s.ecrater.com/stores/64306/4a7b4803ae949_64306b.jpg

Don't think there's any equiv to the Stasis artwork these days. Used to love all the Tennyson/Shakespeare/Poe/etc quotes on Legends-era cards, too.

http://i.backpackgnome.com/11858172334dbcf0ae334519.67025441.jpg

xpost It was 15 euro to enter IIRC (as opposed to 10 for the normal draft) - the guy who organises the weekly events has heaps of boosters lying around apparently and does something like this once a year; I don't think there was anything "valuable" like Alliances/Revised/Antiquities involved. They also had a few packs of Renaissance in Italian, which got confusing pretty fast.

they didn't know the cards sucked! they really had no idea how badly the cards sucked

That's what makes them so entertaining to look at! Especially the legends, their abilities/mana cost/power and toughness wouldn't coorelate at all. It would all seem so random. There would be 2/3 creatures with First Strike, where it's like, what sense does it make to have a first striker with a higher toughness than power? Just things that made no mechanical sense at all. I agree that's there's something endearing about it all! (especially in the art)

haha 2/3 first strike is p rad

i want to build a vintage deck out of all the weird enchant land cards in white cuz they are my absolute favorite kind of cards but its funny how little most of them end up doing

frogs are you playing standard at all? what are you playing?

One of the nights they ran a "Chaos draft" using a couple of boosters from nearly every set back to The Dark & Homelands - they make Legends/Arabian Nights look pretty powerful, heh

We tried this on Netdraft once with the first five expansions. Those sets were clearly NOT made to be drafted. I thought it would be a lot more fun than it wound up being.

frogs are you playing standard at all? what are you playing?

Yeah - my local store is running tournaments with a $1k prize pool which is getting people from all over the state. I wound up getting 3rd/4th with a Seance deck - it was one of the most mentally exhausting tournaments I've ever played. Basically the idea is to win with Lab Maniac, but you can also win with Sun Titan/Phantasmal Image. Now I'm working on an Undying/Proliferate/Culling Dias deck, but I'm not sure if I can get it to compete.

haha i saw that seance/lab maniac deck online and was... skeptical

i have a decent undying deck but its not really standard ready, G/r aggro seems p neat tho

i got 2nd place at a ~60 man tournament last month w/ my birthing pod deck, i think i'm cool with that being the pinnacle of my competitive MTG career

there's a starcitygames open in providence next month that i wanted to play in but then i realized its the exact weekend the new set comes out so i'd have about 24 hours to get any important new cards to update my deck with

xp - Where'd you see it online? basically I've been trying to use Mirror-Mad Phantasm for a long time and Seance seemed like the perfect fit. I really had no idea what to put in the deck so I'd be interested to see other people's ideas for it. Feel like I got lucky with it though, lots of very close victories and I didn't have to mulligan all day.

G/R aggro definitely is good - Strangleroot Geist and Huntsmaster are so ridiculously powerful. Along with Geralf's Messenger that's three insane "2 for 1" (or more!) creatures that can't be dealt with efficiently at all. Sadly I never pulled a Huntsmaster so G/R is off limits for me. Also they're all insane with Birthing Pod. Pod seems like such an insane card now that "Sacrifice a creature" instead means "put a +1/+1 counter on a creature"

there should be a thread on it on mtgsalvation i think he was using snapcasters and armored skaabs in addition to i think 2xlab maniac and 2xmirror-mad

haha i pulled total garbage from innistrad packs but i got three huntmasters (and a sorin) in the dka packs ive opened and traded two cages and a drogs reaver i pulled for the last garruck i needed so i have a p expensive deck for the cost of like half a box? predator ooze is a p insane card too and the combo of undying + blasphemous act is really powerful esp if you have some flayers out and i did really well in the block tournament but i dont think it has enough power for standard...

frogbs i was testing a 4-color seance/unburial deck last month, i'll find the list when i get home from work. it was pretty sweet, though maybe a turn too slow to be really competetive

yeah post the list - mine was just blue/white with some black for Unburial. also Lamp I don't know why you'd want more than one Mirror-Mad - that kills off a lot of the combo potential. you also only need one Lab Maniac. Noxious Revival is a really good card if you're aggressively milling yourself.

the creatures I used were 4 Phantasmal Images, 4 Armored Skaabs, 3 Merfolk Looters, 2 Sun Titans, and 2 Sphinx of Uthuun (really, really, really good in this deck), in addition to the 1 Lab Man and Mirror-Mad. Images and Skaabs really help stall vs. aggro. Ultimately, I lost the way I figured I would - game 3 of the match to go to the finals and I get Nihil Spellbombed 3 times. Not much you can do about that...

undying + blasphemous act is really powerful esp if you have some flayers out

exactly! I am not sure but I think 2 Flayers + 1 Act = 20 damage, b/c each trigger twice? I don't know, but I really like the Flayer anyway.

the keys to that deck (at least the ones I've built) are Culling Dias and Phantasmal Image. Dias turns Young Wolf into a one-mana 2/2 that draws a card. Geist into a 3/2 for GG that draws. It's insane. Image + Undying is also super abusable.

no i was just misremembering - it was also an attempt at a block deck: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=404870

yeah the flayers trigger each other and you can choose the order in which they come back - you can also pump them with kessig before damage resolves apparently but im kinda shaky on some of the rules so have never attempted it

Well, that implies you "only" get 15 damage, since that would be one trigger, then two. I don't really know. The whole deck is a rules nightmare. But it's damn fun!

I haven't really thought about block Seance - I mean Sphinx/Looter/Image were so vital to what I had, I would think you'd have to do something else. However, not having to play against Nihil Spellbomb and Surgical Extraction seem like a massive plus!!

uh, i will giant growth my tundra wolves for four, your go.

haha

pretty sure you'll get 20 damage because they both see each other upon entry simultaneously. it's kind of like in the valakut decks last year where if you were at 4 mountains and then fetched up 2 with your titan, valakut triggered for both of them

ahh, good. Flayer seems like a really underappreciated card in general. I don't know why the 5-color Unburial Rites decks don't pack a couple.

inferno titan's 3 damage divided is just better in the current format, plus you get it again every turn if they dont deal w/ it. flayer kills hero of bladehold but other than that has no great advantage

flayer's def a card to watch for post-rotation but right now the other 6s just blow it out of the water

though i did try to make a modern deck that milled/dredged itself then cast Pyrrhic Revival to 1-shot the opponent with Flayers and friends. it wasn't very good.

the advantage of flayer is that it's better vs. decks with lots of spot removal, which Rites can struggle with. but you're right, that is the reason why. really, the problem with Standard now is that the Titans are all so good that other 6-7 mana creatures are nearly unplayable. I really hope they don't come back this year.

haha yeah titans are a big part of the reason that the avancyn is so unplayable, really, theyre the benchmark atm

i dont mind though since it keeps really good creatures cheap - a playset of flayers cost me $4 - and i have no real desire to play standard competitively

yeah, now more than ever there seem to be a LOT of quality rares in the $1-3 range. instead of ranging from $3-$20 as they did in the pre-mythic days, now everything is either $1-3, $7-8, or $30+. I picked up four Skinshifters from M12 for four bucks, which is nuts because that card seems very, very good. Just don't know how to use him yet.

skinshifter was actually awesome against cawblade, i spent the last couple months between m12 and innistrad rotation beating people up with them. not sure if there's ever gonna be an aggro deck that wants it over strangleroot geist now though

there's a starcitygames open in providence next month that i wanted to play in

going to one of these seems like a nightmare

From what I've heard the prize support is awful, so it's probably not worth it. I don't know much about the pro scene but it seems like with the metagame shifting so rapidly due to the internet and the wide breadth of viable decks in Standard, you can't place high without a good deal of luck. Most Standard formats I remember only had two or three real "Tier 1" decks which meant it was easy to build something specialized to compete.

yeah it seems like standard is (unprecedentedly?) wide open rn which seems exciting, i guess?

ive found out i really like deck-building but w/o regular block events i dont think i could ever play anything but limited competitively

yeah i mostly just draft these days, its the most fun format by far (also the most difficult)

today's preview card is nuts:

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/avr/b7b1vb1clm_en.jpg

I don't think this thing is really great on its own but its ridiculously broken in any format where you have access to Brainstorm or tutor effects. In type 2 you can use Noxious Revival if you dump it in your graveyard. But really I'm interested to see how this impacts other formats where it's a lot more abuseable. Also this thing seems like a ruling nightmare, if someone calls you out on it, saying you didn't actually draw the card this turn, how is a judge supposed to rule on that?

yeah there are whispers that this is just gonna get banned in legacy right away. the next official banlist update isn't until june though

as for standard, i don't know if it's really that powerful without some way to combo out with it. the white miracle is more interesting to me. i'm pretty excited for this set though, it looks bizarre so far

I think you have to cast it *as soon as you draw it* so there isn't room for confusion

yeah but the idea is you can use Brainstorm to put it back on top of your deck so that you get to cast it for 2 mana next turn. it negates the downside of the card which is that sometimes you'll just draw it in your opening hand or off a draw spell and be stuck with a 7-cost card in hand

yeah I get that it's broken, just not the ruling confusion

honestly, brainstorm is the card that's broken, but if they ever banned that, they'd lose a lot of players.

is it not restricted in type1 or whatever the format is called now?

yeah its restricted in vintage but its a sacred cow in legacy

I remember hearing that some pros were also like Rounders-level card mechanics, and unlike that stupid "Morph cheating" problem, I'm not sure how you catch someone at first or even rule for or against someone as a judge.

I also wonder about this thing getting banned in Legacy, but I don't think they ever really ban a card without giving it a fair shake do they? (well outside of Memory Jar, which everyone knew was busted) Even Mental Misstep lasted until the DCI discovered that players were using it "the wrong way" or whatever. I can see this getting a lot of OTHER cards banned though.

also I really hope this thing doesn't see much standard play, I can see turn 1 Ponder, turn 2 Time Walk getting old real quick. as someone who has never played Delver but has played against it a lot I can say the whole "game swings on whatever my opponent draws" is not really a great feeling.

again, I think Noxious Revival is gonna be the key to this in Standard, especially since self-mill is a really efficient strategy now and the big graveyard haters like Nihil Spellbomb and Surgical Extraction are both going away soon

um you can't cast this on turn 2 fyi

well unless you play a birds of paradise turn 1

there are a number of paradise effects you can drop on turn 1...

helll iatee i cannot come to magic gathering gathering tonight cuz i am starting a new job and will be working kinda late and prob not up to going out afterwards, but however, watch out next week!

it's okay, I was gonna say we might have to do it later tonight cause something came up for me too. next week sounds good!

um you can't cast this on turn 2 fyi

ahh yes, for some reason the "when you draw it" part still is eluding me
still, turn 3 I guess? I mean really it's good on any turn.

time walk is more of a combo card than one that goes in a 'fair' deck. it puts you way ahead on mana but not on cards (since your extra draw step just replaces the time walk you used). i think people generally overrate how good it is as a one-shot effect; a big part of the reason its banned everywhere and part of the 'power 9' is because it was pretty easy to loop it

that said, past cards that resembled time walk in some way have all played very strong (remand, mistbind clique, sword of feast and famine) so i guess we'll see

idk, it's harder to think of blue decks that couldn't benefit from 4 time walks than blue decks that could

well yeah time walk has no downside even when it has no upside. not the case with this new card though